| Official White House Photo by Abe McNatt |
| The Trump Justice Department faces a political reckoning this week, when acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a confirmation hearing to serve in the post on a permanent basis. He will likely face sharp questioning from both Democrats and some Republicans on the committee on a wide range of issues, and the outcome is far from clear: He could eventually squeak by and secure confirmation, but it is also very possible that the nomination goes down in flames. |
| The timeline and confirmation math for Blanche have gotten increasingly muddled with the passing of Lindsey Graham overnight and the indefinite hospitalization of Mitch McConnell. Democrats appear unified in opposition, so Blanche’s nomination could falter either at the committee level if a single Republican votes “no,” or on the Senate floor if he loses three votes among the Senate Republican conference. (I am assuming that South Carolina’s Republican governor promptly appoints a temporary replacement for Graham before a full Senate vote.) |
| Two Republicans on the committee have at points expressed reservations about the nomination (Thom Tillis and John Cornyn), as have three more senators in the party (Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Bill Cassidy). At the moment, it is unclear whether McConnell emerges in time for a floor vote or, if he does, whether he ultimately supports Blanche. |
| As a practical matter, however the math ultimately shakes out, the question on the merits arguably boils down to whether Blanche is an improvement over Pam Bondi, who was fired by Trump in April. But as I learned last week — after watching every public appearance Blanche has made since joining the administration, re-reviewing his public record, and taking stock of public polling — the answer to that question is undoubtedly “no.” |
| A year-and-a-half into Trump’s second term, the department is in historic disrepair, and there are plenty of potential reasons — both substantive and political — that a critical mass of Republicans could sink his nomination. |
| Reviewing the Tape |
| Bondi may have been the most openly political and partisan attorney general in modern American history, but — as you can see in the video that we’ve compiled below — Blanche is prepared to inherit that mantle. |
| Among other things, Blanche has consistently backed Trump’s self-serving, false, and revisionist history surrounding the 2020 election and the siege of the U.S. Capitol. (This is not that surprising when you recall that the reason he is in his position is that he led Trump’s criminal defense concerning those events.) He has also doubled down on Trump’s abuse of the department to pursue his political opposition — patting himself on the back for the charges against Democratic congresswoman LaMonica McIver, for instance, and overseeing both the prosecutions of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the second case against former FBI Director James Comey following Bondi’s departure. |
| In public appearances, Blanche is often hostile toward Democrats and the media and sycophantic toward allies. He has, for instance, separately professed his love to both Trump and Stephen Miller and described the Trump-Russia investigation as the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” — a verbatim echo of Trump’s own false claims about the investigation. |
| When faced with difficult questions, Blanche is often indignant, glib, angry, or simply plays dumb. The results are frequently awkward and almost always unproductive, like the time that he lashed out at a reporter in a press conference or when he said that “every American” should be “happy” about Trump’s social media post directing Bondi to prosecute his adversaries. |
| Blanche has also offered a litany of politically motivated falsehoods — among other things, claiming that there is “a ton of evidence that the [2020] election was rigged,” denying things that he has said on tape about the administration being at “war” with federal judges, blaming Democrats in Minnesota for the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal immigration officers, and claiming that Trump wanted maximal transparency concerning the Epstein files. Perhaps the worst episode occurred last August, when he publicly lashed out at a judge for supposedly preventing the administration from “sending Guatemalan children back to their parents in Guatemala” — a claim so false that the department later abandoned it in court. |
| Video by Fred Koschmann |
| You can safely expect Blanche to make all sorts of commitments to senators to get confirmed, but on Friday, the DOJ established that Blanche’s promises are practically meaningless. |
| Prosecutors have subpoenaed several New York Times reporters over an unflattering story about Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One. This comes just three weeks after the department withdrew subpoenas that it had issued targeting several reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal over national security stories — and after Blanche insisted that “reporters are not our targets.” That was a markedly different tone than he had taken previously, prior to sustained criticism from press advocacy groups. |
| He has evidently now reversed his reversal. |
| Broad Public Disapproval of the Department’s Work |
| Blanche began his stint as Deputy Attorney General and is responsible for the same policy initiatives and priorities as Bondi — broadly speaking, the pursuit of Trump’s political adversaries, a historic reallocation of resources toward Trump’s unpopular immigration enforcement policy, and a severe degradation of the department’s work in areas like national security, political corruption, and white-collar crime. |
| As you can see in the chart below, the department’s work has proven unpopular with the public at large, with Americans disapproving of some of the Trump DOJ’s most publicly salient work, and with remarkably bad polling for the two officials most closely associated with it in the public eye — Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel. |
| Blanche is of course entirely responsible for the slush fund billed as the “anti-weaponization fund,” which the DOJ first tried to implement in May, and he led the work on the department’s botched release of the investigative files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. |
| Blanche also shares responsibility for Trump’s $1.4 billion crypto windfall, which has generated broad public criticism, including from otherwise consistent Trump supporters. The crypto industry — which is mostly useless and works by systematically preying on retail investors — got a major boost when Blanche announced last year that the DOJ was retreating from criminal enforcement in the area, and he has similarly brushed aside questions about Trump’s pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. |
| Even before Trump’s financial disclosure, 59% of Americans believed that Trump was using the presidency for personal gain. That number is not going down anytime soon. |
| The “Weaponization” Canard |
| One of Blanche’s most consistent claims is that Trump was the victim of “weaponization” by the Justice Department under Joe Biden, and that the public rejected the DOJ’s prosecutions against Trump in the 2024 election. The claim is false, belied by readily available public data, and politically corrosive. |
| Trump was not the victim of “weaponization” by the Biden Justice Department. The DOJ was right to charge Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election (they should have done it much sooner), and it was right to charge Trump over his retention and mishandling of classified documents after he stonewalled and attempted to mislead the government for over a year after leaving office. |
| The public does not share Blanche’s view, either. |
| After the DOJ’s cases against Trump were filed, I commissioned some polls with Ipsos to get a sense of how the cases were landing with the public. The results showed that roughly 60% of Americans believed that the DOJ’s prosecution against Trump over the 2020 election was based on a fair evaluation of the evidence and the law and that roughly 60% of Americans wanted him to stand trial before the 2024 election. (He was bailed out by the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court.) Even then, more people believed that Trump was guilty of weaponizing the legal system (53%) than Biden (45%). |
| As recently as last November, 58% of respondents to a poll maintained that the federal and state prosecutions against Trump “were justified.” |
| Trump was legitimately reelected — but that was despite the criminal cases against him, not because of them. |
| Crass and Misleading Political Rhetoric |
| Blanche has also publicly personified the politicization of the Trump DOJ in a wide range of contexts, repeatedly employing partisan rhetoric and, in at least one peculiar episode, falsely attributing comments to former President Barack Obama. |
| This has mostly occurred in the context of the administration’s immigration enforcement policy, but it has also occurred in other ways both trivial and telling. He has, for instance, referred to “the Democrat party” (a partisan swipe) and claimed that “Google has deplatformed conservative speech and has put its thumb on the scale politically for years,” an assertion that has been repeatedly rejected by credible independent analysts. |
| But the subject of immigration is where some of Blanche’s most over-the-top claims have been focused. |
| “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?” Blanche said onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year. “Illegals can’t vote.” |
| This was both facile — in reality, voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare — and disturbing given that Trump, who remains deeply unpopular headed into midterm elections that could flip one or both houses of Congress to Democrats, appears desperate to stave off an embarrassing defeat and is perfectly content to lie about voter fraud to do so. Blanche’s rhetoric was also both dehumanizing and beneath the standard that we should expect from the nation’s top law enforcement official. |
| Blanche has also decried “the invasion of criminal aliens” under the Biden administration and encouraged prosecutors to target “the insidious results of the four-year invasion of illegal immigration that we are now working to repel” — partisan political rhetoric that is deeply misleading. (When Blanche told a crowd “I love Stephen [Miller],” he appears to have meant it.) |
| At the CPAC event, Blanche also offered a pat defense of the administration’s lethal boat strikes in international waters against alleged drug traffickers — an initiative that has drawn sharp criticism even from longtime conservative lawyers like John Yoo and that has so far resulted in more than 200 extrajudicial killings. “We are now treating terrorists and treating these narco-dealers as they should be treated,” he said, using the administration’s preferred terms for alleged drug traffickers importing drugs into the U.S. “We’re blowing them up.” |
| In one particularly strange episode, Blanche misquoted Obama in an effort to defend the administration’s immigration policy. |
| Blanche, who was speaking at a Federalist Society event last November, told the audience that Obama had once said, “Even as we are a nation of immigrants, we’re also a nation of laws. Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws and must go.” |
| What Obama actually said was this: “Even as we are a nation of immigrants, we’re also a nation of laws. Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable — especially those who may be dangerous.” He went on to say that his administration was “focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. Felons, not families. Criminals, not children.” |
| Beyond the problem of flatly misquoting the former president in public, it is also ridiculous to suggest that the Obama administration’s enforcement policy was anything like the aggressive and indiscriminate crackdown under the Trump administration. |
| At another event, Blanche criticized a judge who, he said, had issued “a 161-page immigration opinion that included a personal anecdote involving a postcard to a child” that had “nothing to do with the case.” |
| What actually happened is that the judge, an appointee of Ronald Reagan who has served on the bench for nearly half a century, ruled in that decision that noncitizens lawfully present in the U.S. have constitutional free-speech protections — a once-uncontroversial position that the Trump administration had rejected. The judge included an image on the first page of a threatening postcard that he had received from a Trump supporter — it was not “a postcard to a child” (?) — while the case was pending. |
| The best you can say about Blanche’s comments about Obama and the Reagan-appointed judge is that he was incredibly sloppy, if not mendacious, or perhaps relied on incompetent staffers. Neither of these scenarios is defensible for the lawyer at the helm of the Justice Department. |
| Excerpt from opinion in American Association of University Professors v. Rubio, September 30, 2025 |
| The Epstein Debacle |
| Blanche led the department’s response to the public push for the release of the Epstein files, which has been marred by serious errors and omissions. Perhaps more importantly, though, he also repeatedly misled the public last summer in an apparent effort to provide cover for Trump amid the public and political uproar. |
| It was Blanche who went to the courts and filed motions seeking the release of grand jury transcripts in the prosecutions of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. It was apparent from the start that this was unlikely to generate new information and designed to distract the public. |
| Two different presiding judges later confirmed as much. One of them issued a scathing opinion describing the department’s suggestion that the transcripts would produce valuable new information for the public as “demonstrably false” and called the department’s motion “disingenuous.” The second judge echoed the sentiment, concluding that the department’s motion “appear[ed] to be a diversion from the breadth and scope of the Epstein files in the Government’s possession” that could have been released without court intervention or legislation. |
| Blanche, of course, also spent two days questioning Maxwell in prison even though, for a variety of reasons, this made no sense as a prosecutorial matter. The effort was roundly panned as another substantively pointless effort to distract the public. (It was also a waste of time and taxpayer money.) |
| Blanche, however, sought to defend the effort as a bold fact-gathering initiative on behalf of the American public. “Justice demands courage,” he said after the interview was first announced last July. He echoed this claim as recently as this April, but it remains preposterous. A large plurality of Americans now believe that the Trump administration has hurt efforts to hold Epstein’s alleged associates accountable rather than help them. |
| There is little question that Trump himself and the Justice Department are largely responsible for the ensuing, rolling debacle, which has satisfied pretty much no one. The whole thing kicked off after Trump and top administration officials reversed themselves last year on releasing the files — an apparent effort to protect Trump from embarrassment over his own presence in the documents — and, in the process, inadvertently provided crucial momentum for the eventual passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. |
| Blanche has since insisted (repeatedly) that Trump always wanted full transparency and disclosure from the Justice Department and that the department could not have produced anything without the legislation. Both claims are demonstrably false. |
| Misrepresenting Data |
| “Since President Trump took office,” Blanche said at a press conference last month, “if you look at any stat across the board, it’s much better.” This too is untrue. |
| You can see this most clearly in the data on financial fraud, which has consistently risen for years according to the FBI’s own data, including under the second Trump administration. This has coincided with the ongoing, yearslong de-prioritization of white-collar prosecutions, according to long-term data compiled and maintained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. |
| It is tempting to chalk up this discrepancy to Blanche speaking off the cuff at a podium, but it is a telling encapsulation of several different problematic aspects of his tenure — the shift away from prosecuting white-collar crime as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown, the retreat from criminal crypto enforcement, and a persistent willingness to breeze past (if not deliberately misrepresent) politically inconvenient facts. |
| The Political Question |
| It remains to be seen whether any of this will ultimately move a critical mass of Republican senators to vote against Blanche’s nomination. |
| Thom Tillis, for his part, has said that he will not tolerate any “equivocation on January 6,” but that already happened when Blanche publicly celebrated Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons. Despite that, Tillis recently said that he had “a positive predisposition towards Blanche.” Blanche may try to walk back or equivocate on his prior remarks during this week’s confirmation hearing (or perhaps just misrepresent what he actually said), but it is not a good sign that Tillis, who is retiring from the Senate in January, appears prepared to look the other way. |
| That said, it remains possible that Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn — both of whom lost their reelection bids this year after Trump endorsed their primary opponents — will prove to be harder sells. Cassidy recently got in a shouting match with Trump in a closed-door meeting with Senate Republicans about the war in Iran, while Cornyn has criticized Trump for insisting on “slavish” loyalty to the president. |
| Meanwhile, Susan Collins continues to face a difficult path to reelection this year, notwithstanding the implosion of Graham Platner’s candidacy last week. Trump is deeply unpopular with Maine voters, and a vote to confirm Blanche would provide additional fodder for her eventual Democratic opponent to tag her as a Trump enabler. |
| Lisa Murkowski, for her part, is up for reelection in 2028, and that is closer than it may seem. Trump is unpopular in the state, and Murkowski has at times clashed with Trump, who has lashed out at her and recently accused her of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” This is not exactly the best way to whip up support for a controversial Cabinet nominee, but she has also voted to confirm virtually all of Trump’s Cabinet. |
| We’ll find out soon enough how this ends, but one thing is certain: No one who votes to confirm Blanche will be able to say that they didn’t know what they were getting. |